Japan has told the UN nuclear watchdog a spent fuel storage pond was on fire at an earthquake-stricken reactor and radioactivity was being
released "directly" into the atmosphere, the Vienna-based agency said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), citing information it had received from Japanese authorities, said dose rates of up to 400 millisievert
per hour have been reported at the Fukushima power plant site.

"The Japanese authorities are saying that there is a possibility that the fire was caused by a hydrogen explosion," it said in a statement.

At the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, where an explosion Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor, the spent fuel pool, in
accordance with General Electric’s design, is placed above the reactor. Tokyo Electric said it was trying to figure out how to maintain water levels
in the pools, indicating that the normal safety systems there had failed, too. Failure to keep adequate water levels in a pool would lead to a
catastrophic fire, said nuclear experts, some of whom think that unit 1’s pool may now be outside.

“That would be like Chernobyl on steroids,” said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public
oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1.

People familiar with the plant said there are seven spent fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi, many of them densely packed.

Gundersen said the unit 1 pool could have as much as 20 years of spent fuel rods, which are still radioactive.

I have spent a lot of time researching Chernobyl in the past years, and there are many extremely eye-opening documentaries about it. The way they had
to go in teams for only a few minutes and conduct clean up work, and the many workers who fell ill from the exposure, etc.

Chernobyl was an impressive disaster, to say the least, and the actual video footage from the event is simply jaw dropping.

I can only imagine the consequences of the Japanese events. It will be different of course, but many factors will be similar as well.

One major similarity is the basic issue itself. We are dealing with a full-blown disaster here. It is only going to get worse before it gets any
better.

Originally posted by this_is_who_we_are
And the" World News Now" anchors on ABC are still reporting that there's no immediate danger to public health for those living in Tokyo.
Deliberately downplaying, or just idiots? You decide.

Probably 50/50... spineless reporters with no ethics at all... while being an ignorant bunch.

Which is really a shame that they call themselves ``reporters`` or ``press``... they really are giving journalism a bad name.

I never thought a nuclear power plant could explode from a fission reaction but this is what they are saying:

Both United States and Japanese governments have for decades allowed re-racking of the pools to reduce the originally-designed minimum safe distance
between the assemblies so that more rods can be stored in each pool. Utilities complained they were running out of storage space on site at the
reactors. The problem is if the spent fuel gets too close, they will produce a fission reaction and explode with a force much larger than any fission
bomb given the total amount of fuel on the site. All the fuel in all the reactors and all the storage pools at this site (1760 tons of Uranium per
slide #4) would be consumed in such a mega-explosion. In comparison, Fat Man and Little Boy weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained less
than a hundred pounds each of fissile material.

It is my understanding the pool at the top of reactor #4 overheated, created hydrogen and exploded.

Donnay said, “If these pools are breached (as could have happened in the explosions, Fukushima #3 looks worse than #1) and can no longer hold water,
the spent fuel racked inside them will start to overheat, and eventually melt and burn. And since there is no longer any roof above these pools in
reactors 1 and 3, all the radioactivity they contain is directly open to the atmosphere.”

That is why they are called reporters.
I am glad that there are people out there that know the difference between a journalist and a reporter.
For those who don't know a journalist digs for a story, a reporter could be a parrot, literally.

(Edit) This is a scientis / Journalist.
Good look at Chernobyl and what happens to effected ares.

According to
this
articlethere may be something like 600,000 fuel rods in the plant in total. This is just mind boggling. I was wondering aloud on the other
thread what on Earth this would mean in terms of potential global repercussions - if all the reactors melted down, breaching containment, and then all
these fuel rods melted as well ? I know this is the very worst case scenario but it's not impossible that it will happen. Everyone mentions radiation
reaching America and Russia potentially, but what about Europe ? I'm in the UK and I hear stories about how the Chernobyl incident still causes issues
for UK farmers today.

I am just shocked that this could happen. Not just the engineering failures but the management at the plant seemed to drop the ball one time after
another. Venting hydrogen into building one without venting the building, then doing it again with building three and expecting a different result. At
least on building two they were knocking holes on the walls to try to vent it before it went. Then they have pump trucks that run out of fuel and pump
no water 180 min while the reactor vessel goes dry. Reservoir ponds drying up and no pumping for two hours. I mean come on, these people have all the
resources of the military/government if they just pick up a phone.

I hope all those end of world enthusiasts and Rambo wannabes are watching and taking note. You can't fight an earthquake, a tsunami or a nuclear
meltdown with a gun. Death this way is not glamorous. Nor does it have to be quick.
Take note of the advice coming out of Japan. No health risks IMMEDIATELY. So you dodge a bullet and 10 years down the line it all kicks in. As for the
global effects, we all need to pray.

I feel for the Japanese right now. Stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I've followed this disaster from Canada, and been more horrified as each new revelation is brought before us.
It's sad, and I can't even imagine what the average citizen there must be going through.
My thoughts are with them all.

That being said, when the hell should we all start running? Things are going from bad to worse, atomically speaking, I'm torn on whether or not to
just leave right now.

Water in a pool storing spent nuclear fuel at the No. 4 reactor that caught fire Tuesday morning at the quake-hit Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power
plant may be boiling, causing the water level to drop, an official of Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

The reactor was not in service when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake jolted Fukushima Prefecture and other areas in northeastern Japan on Friday, the
official in charge of the facility said.

I watched this documentary again today and seeing as this is a much more serious
situation it will become the next war. It only took 500,000 to "clean-up" Chernobyl and something is going to have to be done to fix this. Many
lives in the disaster, many lives in the clean up. One would like to logically assume that after Chernobyl the human race wised up and stopped using
nuclear energy because of the risks. Can't use logic there, I guess. We get what is coming to us.

I've also been thinking today what goes up must come down. Where is all of this going to come down? How much will the sea absorb and what will it do
there?

If Chernobyl helped push the regime out of Russia then what will happen in Japan? What will be left livable?

A massive emergency response operation is under way in northern Japan, with world governments and international aid groups coming together to
bring relief to the beleaguered island nation. Ninety-one countries and regions and six international organizations have offered assistance, according
to the Japanese Foreign Affairs Ministry.

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